Arkadii Nepytaliuk grew up in a small village in Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region under the control of the Soviet Union. “As a child, I did not know about the existence of LGBT people at all. I learned about them in Kyiv when I was studying … and they scared me a lot. I was scared to imagine that a guy could fall in love with another guy.”
Nepytaliuk, now 56, is a film director whose latest film Lessons of Tolerance hopes to challenge Ukrainian people to rethink how they treat others in society. Inspired by Igor Bilyts’ 2017 play Gay Parade, the film follows a struggling, homophobic Ukrainian family who agree to host a gay activist in exchange for funding from the EU. Like the family in his film, Nepytaliuk found his prejudices started to give way to acceptance by “studying, talking and working” with LGBTQ+ people as he got older. “I discovered that these people are just like me … and in [that] process of discovery my fear of LGBT people decreased and disappeared.”
